[X] My Assistant

[lyford]

If you're gonna go bad, you might as well make it good!

What are your "favorite" launch failures?

(pic snagged from Rocket Explosions)

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[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

(1) CBS spent 6 straight months following the assembly of one Juno 2 booster that was supposed to launch an Explorer satellite in mid-1959, with the intention of telecasting an hour-long TV show on the subject. The plans were hastily cancelled after said rocket lifted off, instantly started to turn upside down and toward the cameramen, and was blown up in mid-air 5 seconds after launch. (You may have seen the photos of that one; it would have been Explorer 6 had it succeeded, and the satellite type on it was later successfully relaunched as Explorer 7.)

(2) One of the Mercury 7 -- I believe it was Alan Shepard -- said that in mid-1960 NASA invited all the Mercury astronauts to watch the first test flight of a fully detailed unmanned Mercury capsule on an Atlas. The effect was somewhat spoiled by the fact that this launch was Mercury-Atlas 1, which blew up with no warning at all a minute after launch when it hit Max Q -- and, to make the effect even more comforting, this particular capsule was not equipped with an escape rocket and got blown to bits along with the rocket.

(3) Nor should we forget such immortal failures as the first Atlas-Able launch of a lunar Pioneer (nose shroud fell off, followed by the probe and then the third stage), or the first attempt to fly an unmanned Mercury on a Redstone. (The rocket started to lift off, shut down its engine one second later due to a faulty sensor, and bumped still upright back down on the pad without exploding. The capsule, having assumed that the rocket had shut down normally at the end of its burn, immediately ejected its escape rocket -- which took off spectacularly from the top of the rocket while it was still sitting on the launch pad -- then sampled the environment outside and concluded that it was already time to open its parachute and start scattering radar chaff and flashing its recovery light beacon, all of which it did while still sitting on top of the rocket. The capsule itself being undamaged, it was reflown on a replacement Redstone just a month later completely successfully.) I got a whole 10th-grade English composition just out of the accounts of these early failures.